TOC Coffee Roasters, LLC.

The mazapan latte is one of the best lattes a customer will tell you they have ever had, and that claim sounds like exaggeration until you order one and stop talking for a minute. TOC sits in Jefferson Park in Chicago, on West Montrose, and the storefront is easy enough to drive past that you should have the address loaded before you get close. Inside, the room is small in a way that constrains everything else about the operation. The pastry case is Latin-American and made by the owners themselves, by hand, and the staff goes out of the way for kids and families in a way that gets named in nearly every regular account of the place. The orange cortado comes topped with a strip of orange peel and is worth ordering for the cortado alone, never mind the peel. The guava and cheese pastry. The almond croissant. The pan de bono. The ginger carrot muffin. All worth ordering, none filler, all reasons the pastry case is half the reason regulars come in the first place. There is no wifi. Seating is sharply limited, and on a Saturday morning you will be standing if you arrive after nine. The cafe is built for walk-in customers who want excellent coffee and house-made Latin-American pastries to take with them, not for laptop workers or for anyone hoping for a private parking lot in Jefferson Park (you will be parking on the street, and the side streets fill up fast). Come in, order well from someone who cares what you eat, sit if there is a seat, and go. The point of the place is that it does its narrow thing with serious attention, and the room is small precisely because the owners would rather make it well than make it big.